Theology in the Wheel of Time Revisited

Just as the Wheel of Time constantly turns, and what once was is again, I'm reevaluating the theology of the Wheel of Time. I've been reading Stephen Prothero's book God is not One, his world religions class condensed into a single book. As per the title, he presents eight major world religions not all as fundamentally the same phenomenon which manifest in different ways, but as eight rival ways of stating a problem and solution to the challenges of the world. In Prothero’s book, different religions don’t have the same endpoint, they have the same beginning, a sense that life is not what it should be. This has changed how I think about the theological landscape of the WoT universe. I also think Rand al’Thor, the hero and prophesied savior of the Wheel of Time, is the anti-Buddha. We’ll get there.

My last article is basically a diatribe against the Creator. Not much is known about the Creator, other than they created the universe including the Dark One, the embodiment of and source of all evil. The creation of the Dark One in order for evil to exist is my problem with the Creator. This is justified in the books by the following argument: without evil, the people in the universe are mere automatons that must do good. It doesn’t matter what they want, they must do good because there is no evil. While I stand by my criticism of the Creator for creating evil and my refusal to acknowledge the Creator as good, I was coming at the theology of the world from a very Christian biased perspective. Where the major monotheistic religions like Christianity and Islam view God as not just good, but the source and very essence of all goodness (as well as love, joy, peace, etc.) not all religions depend on having a central good God. Despite having a singular Creator, which implies a monotheistic world, the spiritual problems of the people of WoT are much closer to the problems addressed by Buddhism because of the shared cycle of reincarnation. The questions characters in WoT ask aren’t ‘how can a good God create evil?’ (because the Creator isn’t necessarily good in their cosmology), they’re more like ‘what’s the point of living and suffering only to be ceaselessly reborn?’

In both Buddhism and the Wheel of Time, there is a cycle of life, death and rebirth, called Samsara in Hinduism and Buddhism. According to both Buddhists and, in the Wheel of Time, the villainous Forsaken Ishamael, “rebirth is undesirable because life is marked with suffering.” The first two insights of the Buddha is that human existence is characterized by suffering, and that this suffering has an origin. We suffer, Prothero writes, because of “our tendency to mistake things that are changing as unchanging and then to cling desperately to their supposedly unchanging forms.” The goal of Buddhism is to end the cycle of rebirth and escape suffering by releasing the changeable things we cling to and reaching nirvana. Isamael’s goal is to end the cycle of rebirth and escape suffering through releasing the Dark One from his prison and being annihilated. The means are different but the goal of both is the same, to escape the suffering that comes with the cycle of rebirth. 

This is why I now see Rand as the “anti-Buddha.” Throughout much of the book series, Rand struggles with this question of suffering. Rand is the Dragon Reborn and it is his destiny to save the world. But Rand looks at all of the suffering and hardship in the world and questions why he should save it. Saving the world, after all, means continuing the endless roll of Samsara. At the climax of his arc and the book the Gathering Storm, Rand stands at the pinnacle of the world and asks why he should save a world full of pain, be reborn and save it all over again, ad nauseum, “Why? Why must they do this over and over? The world could give him no answers… He would end it all and let men rest, finally, from their suffering.” A magic wielder of untold power, Rand could do just that, end the world and with it the Wheel of Suffering. But as he steels himself to shatter existence he has an epiphany, “Why? Because each time we live, we get to love again.”

This is why I say that Rand is the anti-Buddha. The first Noble Truth, that life is marked with suffering, has always struck me as pessimistic. Yes, life is marked with suffering, but it is also marked with a myriad of things like boredom, pleasure, and love. I will admit that my knowledge of Buddhism is shallow. I’d be happy to learn that I’m wrong in thinking that Buddhism is pessimistic in foregrounding suffering in the way it does. Likely, Buddhism itself is a veil that is keeping me from seeing things non-dualistically.  However, the Buddha seems to imply that while love, joy, apathy, objects, persons, and everything are changing and ephemeral, suffering alone remains. Rand, on the other hand, chooses to elevate love over all else. For Rand, life contains suffering, but it is defined by love. And because life holds within it capacity to love, life is worth living, even an endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth. 

Robert Jordan populates the Wheel of Time with a mix of Eastern and Western religious allusions. Rand, like Jesus, is wounded on the palms of his hands and is stabbed in the side by a spear. Mat, another of the central characters, loses an eye while gaining wisdom, is hanged, and carries a spear with two ravens called thought and memory, like Odin. Reincarnation is an integral part of the world. The sign of the Aes Sedai is clearly the ying yang symbol, and there is a prophecy that states, “under this sign, the Dragon will conquer,” a reference to Constantine’s dream of conquering under the symbol of Christ. While I often wonder if there is any deeper significance to these allusions, I think Rand’s epiphany illustrates why Jordan blends Constantine with Confucius. If there was a religion in the world of the Wheel of Time, my guess is that the problem would be the endless cycle of Samsara, but the solution would be to love your neighbor as yourself. Life, according to Rand, is an opportunity for love, not a meaningless stage for suffering, so the greatest commandment is not to escape to nirvana, but to love.